Page 7 - Covid 12 July 2021

Office of the PSA is facilitating industry contributions to boost health
infrastructure by bringing in innovation in hospital construction
With a contagious disease such as COVID-19, it is essential to have smart health infrastructure to screen, contain, and treat patients. Unlike urban areas, rural areas do not have plenty of existing infrastructure that can be converted to hospitals. There, it is difficult to construct buildings from scratch as the requirement is immediate. The office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India has identified two start-ups – Modulus Housing and Picture Time Digiplex – for revving up the hospital bed infrastructure within a short period of time, across the country. The start-ups are working on two different innovative technology deliverables.
An IIT Madras-incubated start-up called Modulus Housing has developed an innovative hospital construction module to tackle the problem of quick installation and functioning of a hospital with the required facilities. The start-up has developed a portable hospital unit that can be installed anywhere within two hours by four people. Called MediCAB, it is a decentralised approach to detect, screen, identify, isolate and treat COVID-19 patients in their local communities through these portable microstructures. It is foldable and is composed of four zones – a doctor’s room, an isolation room, a medical room/ward and a twin-bed ICU, maintained at negative pressure. Modulus Housing, an early stage start-up incubated at IIT Madras partnered with a government institute, Sree Chitra Thirunal Institute Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST), an autonomous institution of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) to develop a negative pressured four-zone medical strategy for the deployment of hospital extension to effectively arrest cross contamination.
External view of inflatable medical facility
VOL. IV ISSUE 6
VIGYAN PRASAR 3
NATION’S S&T EFFORTS AGAINST COVID-19